A Photographic Life-429: 'The Proust Photo Quiz' with Photographer Emily Garthwaite

In this week’s episode photographer and filmmaker Emily Garthwaite takes on our ‘Proust Photo Quiz’.

The Proust Questionnaire is a set of questions answered by the French writer Marcel Proust. Proust answered the questionnaire in a confession album, a form of parlour game popular at the end of the 1890s. The album, titled An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc. was found in 1924 and published in the French literary journal Les Cahiers du Mois. Our ‘Proust Photo Quiz’ is an adaption of the original text.

Emily Garthwaite

Garthwaite took up photography as a teenager intendeding to pursue painting at Central Saint Martins, but found herself studying Film and Photography. After working in club and fashion photography, she completed a Master of Arts in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the University of Westminster in 2016. It was when she visited India for the first time to scatter her grandmother's ashes in Assam, that she decided to work within photojournalism. The photographs from her months of travel through India were exhibited at the Norman Rea Gallery in 2014 under the title Afterlife. During the summer of 2015, Garthwaite worked with the Rațiu Family Charitable Foundation in Romania, where she documented the salt flats of Turda. In 2017, the Iranian Arts Institute invited her to photograph the Arba'een Pilgrimage, which instigated the series Iraq: Road to Arba'een. She co-directed her first feature-length documentary on the subject titled 41 Days in Iraq on Arba'een or The 40th Day, which screened in 2018 at the Chehelcheragh International Festival. In 2019 she spent time in Dearborn, Michigan capturing its local Muslim community and was named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. In 2020, she returned to Iraq, visiting the Zagros Mountains and Tigris River accompanying the Bakhtiari people on their Kooch migration. She exhibited A Journey Down the Tigris River at the Visa pour L'Image in Perpignan, where she won the 2023 ICRC Humanitarian Visa d'or Award, and Tears of the Tigris at the Leica Gallery London. Her project Light Between Mountains received a CCFD–Terre Solidaire grant, while her contributions to the Leon McCaron Noema essay The Last of the Marsh Arabs won her the 2022 Covering Climate Now Award for Photography. In 2024, Save the Children commissioned her to photograph the Yazidi community in Iraq 10 years on from the Yazidi genocide. She is a Leica Ambassador. www.emilygarthwaite.com

Dr.Grant Scott

After fifteen years art dir